Aquatics Centre in Brescia

This new public Aquatics Centre is in Mompiano, a suburb north of Brescia, near the local football stadium. The design was a 2005 winner of an international competition and it has a definite urban feel. The architecture of the complex does not follow the idea of a generic sports building that is little more than a shell for three pools, each with a separate function. Instead, it seeks deliberately to create relations, both between the structure and the city, and within the building itself. The complex has a main building, with the three outdoor pools on the western side, open spaces to north and a leisure area to the west. The glazed wall along the ground floor, on the northern side, provides interaction between outdoor and indoor spaces, including the halls housing the indoor pools. The southern and eastern sides face onto the city streets. The architecture interacts with these public spaces, through the configuration of clear, parallelepiped geometries. The volumes are easy to distinguish, set in an evident, yet impressive arrangement that deliberately adds essential lines to the urban backdrop. The building is easy to recognise. The outer walls are arranged along lines and bands that follow the horizontal dimension of the building. The volume is broken up, interrupting this linear development and highlighting the entrances, providing suggestive hints of the indoor division of space. The external walls are clad with klinker bricks, producing the effect of a thick, dark wall marked by variations in colour that help give a sense of continuity that is picked up by the horizontal glazed sections (on the northern side, in relation to the open space on the plot, and on the western side, thus bringing definition to the façade and playing on solids and voids). On the street-facing side, the mass of the volume juts out slightly. It is also clad with klinker bricks and rests on the transparent or semitransparent sections below, a glazed ribbon in the middle and the large section of glass blocks that provide light to the basement level. On the eastern side, the building also overhangs. The side overlooking the road is "closed" off, marked by a wall that protects a pebbly transition area next to a glazed section in the building with the main pool that interacts with a sheltered space softened by a tank of bamboo plants. Three functional cores can be identified: the large pool, for water polo (33x25 m), a hall with glulam beams and a stand on the southern side, two smaller pools for practice and learning to swim, a room with large windows facing onto the outdoor pool and the open space; and the change rooms and toilets that are located in the basement and on first floor. Indoors, both the cladding and colours are extremely simple. In the room with the smaller pools, glazed walls and klinker-clad walls, with dark colours and changing shades, interact with the clear floor against which the pool stands out.

Francesco Pagliari

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